INDEX OF QUOTES
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Promoting competency gives child care workers a commonly acceptable means to achieve our goals. It provides a rational, coherent and integrated philosophical common denominator for co-ordinating our efforts and restructuring programmes so that they are fully relevant to the needs of the developing child ... A competency-based program focused on health and normal development views the child positively, e.g. as a student rather than a patient, and also ecologically in the context of family, school, community, etc. It seeks, through developing positive competencies, to achieve the more realistic goal of helping the child become more acceptable and the environment more accepting. This is in marked contrast to the more abstract and less feasible goal of ‘curing’ the child. The medical psychopathology model, with its negative focus on pathology and dysfunction, stigmatises the child and abstracts children from their ecological relationships in search of intrapsychic causality. In helping environments, this often results in those furthest from the child exercising the most power over the child, relying on high-priced specialists, and fragmenting the child’s life. |
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